Matt Bevin’s bid to take on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the race for a Kentucky Senate seat ran afoul of most definitions of good taste this week as news of Bevin’s attendance at a pro-cockfighting rally spread across the political landscape.

Representatives for the Tea Party candidate quickly claimed that the rally was not in favor of cockfighting, but “states’ rights.” The only problem: organizers of the event told the Corbin News Journal that the rally was actually only about cockfighting. Seven hundred people reportedly attended, seemingly in support of legalizing cockfighting in Kentucky.

“The movement is about changing the law, not breaking the law,” the director of the American Gamefowl Defense Network—an organization that apparently actually exists—told the News Journal.

Presumably after doing a happy dance and thanking their lucky stars, McConnell’s team seized on Bevin’s speech at the event. “Matt Bevin has no credibility left whatsoever,” McConnell’s press secretary Allison Moore told theDaily Mail. “At this point nothing surprises us with this guy.”

Cockfighting, in which game birds are sent into a ring to battle to their death, is illegal in every state and, per the Humane Society of the United States, is a felony in 40 states. It’s also still the rage: in February, New York’s Organized Crime Task Force seized some 3,000 birds and arrested 70 people during Operation Angry Birds. Raids on a cockfight in Queens, a pet shop in Brooklyn, and a 90-acre farm in upstate New York proved lucrative for state Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, who vowed to “keep working to hold these individuals accountable, and put an end to illegal cockfighting.”

A clip of Bevin speaking on a radio show Thursday seems to indicate that the candidate has changed his line of defense. “It’s interesting. When you look at cockfighting, and dog fighting as well, this isn’t something new,” Bevin said. “It wasn’t invented in Kentucky, for example. I mean, the Founding Fathers were all—many of them—very actively involved in this and always have been.” Benjamin Franklin was also a slave-owner—no word yet on how that factors into Bevin’s moral calculus. .